The Walking Dead Season 2 Discussion *Spoilers*

But, gang signs and catchphrases would be so much cooler!

 

Maybe. I just find it weird that now we finally have an all-out zombie show on TV and it's not only extremely successful, but frankly much better than anybody could have hoped for, and yet all people online seem to do is complain about it.

 

Not me. I have very little bad to say about this show.

 

Thats probably because we hardly ever see any zombies. They need to get off this farm ASAP.

 

Soapy gore, mmmmm.

Returning briefly to the CDC Guy's Big Secret, and then I'll stop, promise...maybe Beth's suspicious illness is a sign that you don't have to be bit by a zombie to become zombified. Maybe the virus is airborne and everyone is now a ticking clock.

If zombification after death is inevitable, who cares, people can learn to cope. But while you're still alive, regardless of the care you take to avoid being bit? Now that would be depressing!

Unless you're immune. Rick is immune. He already went through the no-bite-zombification process and survived.

Overall, this is a terrific show. I don't find it "too slow" at all, and any quibbles with characterization are easy to write off with "they're all under insane amounts of stress, what do you expect."

 

But Maggie had at least as close an encounter with a zombie (in the pharmacy) as did her sister.

Furthermore, during last season, with all the zombie guts splattering round and both Rick and Glenn disguising themselves in blood and entrails... and in this season, Daryl's habit of wiping used arrows off on his pant leg (not to mention a zombie chewing on his shoe)... if the virus was airborne they'd all be zombies by now.

 

You're really hoping for this aren't you? I think it cheapens things if one of our characters is "the one". It's Mary Sue-ish territory.

 

At times I really wish HBO had gotten this show intead of AMC. At least the show would have a decent budget for something that gets such huge ratings.

 

I wouldn't anticipate a departure into such territory. Every interview I've read with Kirkman, Darabont, and now Mazzarra has suggested that none of them have been or are interested in such a larger perspective.

If that does happen, I hope the group suffers some more casualties. There are still too many characters that very little has been done with, so we might as well toss out T-Dog, Beth, and Patricia (though she does play an incredibly naive and idiotic role in the comics during a future camp setting).

EDITED TO ADD: Jimmy should be a casualty too. Forgot about him when I posted last night.

 

T-Dog's single "WHO'S THAT?!?!?!?!?" line in the lastest episode when they brought the new kid to the farm made me laugh. They are doing absolutely NOTHING with the character. T-Dog doing so little every episode has become a running joke.

 

This... I love the pace of the show and even though they have strayed off the comic canon (don't really care about that), they have kept the flavor of the comic... The farm, the camp... they are micro-cosms unto themselves. They are chapters. While part of me would like them to pick up the pace a bit and explore new places, that could easily lead to "zombie metropolis of the week" and I DON'T want to see that.

 

T Dog is the Travis Mayweather of The Walking Dead.

 

Ever see the movie Fido? Apart from making zombies servants they seem to have a society that works.

 

You mean the comedy where they rely on a collar that magically stops zombies from being flesh-hungry monsters from Hell (or in other words, not zombies at all)? And where when one of the magical collars does malfunction, a small outbreak occurs and is only stopped when super soldiers are sent to clean it up? And the same film where, despite that, there's still a "wild zone" full of rampaging zombie monsters anyway?

To paraphrase from something I saw just the other day: "How do you kill a vampire?" "Stake through the heart, garlic, sunlight... I dunno." "No, you can kill a vampire however the fuck you want, because vampires don't fucking exist. You can make up rules for whatever the fuck you want."

Pointing to some lame zombie using rules and a setting completely alien to the discussion at hand is pretty pointless. Fido is nothing like Walking Dead in any way, shape, or form. There's nothing even remotely similar about them aside that they both have zombies, and even then they're completely and utterly different from the ones in Walking Dead.

 

Oh, come on now, Mayweather was the blandest character out there played by a less than capable actor who rarely could deliver his lines without inducing a cringe...one of the many reasons why Enterprise sucked.

If I were to compare T Dog to anyone, it would be "Token" from South Park. Hopefully the writers make better use of that character down the line.

-Jamman

 

There's a certain irony in your insisting that a zombie outbreak would HAVE to end a particular way (living on earth forever with no way for humanity to adapt) and then chastising another poster for not realizing it's a fictional premise where the writers can "make up rules for whatever [they] want."

 

I suspect T-dog is going to play a major role in the future if, for no other reason, I also suspect Merle is coming back very soon.

 

Try re-reading what you quoted. In particular:

I'm "chastising" someone for pointing to something completely alien and unrelated to the fictional world being discussed, where they're using it as proof for how a normal -- that's the keyword, mind you, of the entire discussion at hand -- society could evolve in The Walking Dead.

And I think that's the big thing some of you are missing. I'm not saying that it's impossible for some kind of society to form in a zombie-ridden world, but it won't be anything even remotely normal or what we're accustomed to. Which was the point of this branch of the conversation, and why Rick has likely not told the others about what the CDC might have told him (about everyone already being infected). Because that knowledge would eliminate all hope of any kind of normalcy returning to these characters, diminished as it may currently be. Hope of finding a safe haven is the only thing they have, but if everyone is already infected -- meaning they don't have to be bitten to be turned -- completely and utterly negates that hope. Because no matter where they go, no matter who they live with, the threat of an outbreak will be there.

And no, they don't have magical collars or elite armies of corporate super soldiers to protect them. And no, the painfully insipid suggestion that the only necessary change is adding a gunshot to the head to burial rites won't do it, either.

 

If we're going to play the "my understanding of the fictional rules of various universes is better than yours" game, then I'd argue that Fido takes place years if not decades after the "Zombie Wars" were won, and not weeks after the zombie apocalypse. Plenty of time for a society to establish itself, invent collars, etc. I'm fully with Santeria that these worlds are different and can't be held to each other's rules (except in the sense that genres do have rules), but if you really wanted to, you could explain the differences away by referring to the time scale.

On another note, the new arc in the graphic novel Walking Dead series is called "A Larger World." So Kirkman might be about to give us something bigger.

 

Ah, good point. I wasn't considering Merle when I posted earlier. The desire of the producers to bring Michael Rooker back at some time is all the justification we need to keep T-Dog around, after all.

(I also edited my earlier post to include Jimmy, whom I had forgotten because... well, what has he done?)

Oh, interesting. Thanks for pointing that out. I'm still a little ways behind in the comics series.

I think the last issue I read was #72, the last entry in the "Life Among Them" arc.